Consumers' Republic

16 Feb 2003 by Scott Upton

A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America is a new book from Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen. Among other things, the books examines the process that helped create the little niche markets that mark today’s world:

It was no accident that the rise of market segmentation corresponded to the historical era of the 1960s and 1970s, when social and cultural groups such as African-Americans, women, youth, and senior citizens began to assert themselves in a way that came to be called “identity politics,” where people’s affiliation with a particular community defined their cultural consciousness and motivated their collective political action. Marketers who, had they not been in search of new ways to avoid saturated mass markets, might have despaired at the splintering of the mass in the 1960s, soon seized the opportunities for selling it offered.

The complete interview with the author can be found on HBS Working Knowledge.